Which is why people who actually look at trends tend to compare it more to the Dot-com bubble.

The short version? A few early internet adopting sites (like Amazon…) set up online retail presences. People were ecstatic because you could now do most of the monthly shopping online and even re-buy pants that you know will fit and so forth.

Seeing money, EVERYBODY made an online retailer or service website and EVERYONE wanted to invest in that.

Then the market was oversaturated and companies with no right to exist went bankrupt and it was a bloodbath.

Except… not really. Because while the massively overinflated stock market did indeed “downturn” and a LOT of those scam companies went away, the actual fundamental premise of online first companies was a very sound one. I mean… just look at “Cyber Monday” and so forth.

And “AI” will almost definitely go the same route. Because, yeah, LLMs are HORRIBLE for accounting and finance. But they are actually really good for replacing the early career folk who translate earnings into reports. And ML in general is excellent at detecting patterns which can mean potentially billions of dollars in investing. But, like all things, it is about verification and caution. You actually need a human to read that earnings report before you send it to the investors. And you only give your “AI” a small portion of your portfolio. Same as with any team.

What you are describing is something different… that is “close enough” to Moore’s Law for all but the most pedantic.

The (I forget the proper economics term so) base price of RAM/Storage does indeed go down as new processes and economies of scale are developed. But the cost of a “laptop hard drive” remains pretty steady in the sense that a couple hundred MB was enough back in the day but you REALLY want at least 500 gigs now. The price per byte does indeed drop rapidly but the price per “drive” is far more stable (not fully stable due to inflation and how many people are buying them, but within spitting distance).

Its why a good rule of thumb was to always just spend roughly the same on storage during an upgrade and that would result in faster technologies and larger capacity drives and so forth.

That isn’t what is happening with RAM in 2025. A much better comparison is GPUs because… it is the same problem. It is ridiculously high demand from businesses (often startups pouring dump trucks of VC money into their only hope… well, VC money or drug money in the case of miners but they matter a lot less these days) driving this. A quick search didn’t yield an easy graph and I can’t be bothered to go dig through Gamers Nexus’s twelve videos on it, but the price of an “entry level” GPU has drastically changed in the past decade.

But just for two-ish data points?

• The GTX 980 and 970 had an MSRP (probably) of 550 and 330 USD, respectively, back in 2014
• While there is some other bullshit involved, the RTX 5080 and 5070 have MSRPs of 1000 USD and 550 USD in 2025
• Adjusting for inflation, the 980 and 970 would still only be about 753 and 451 USD in 2025 dollars
• And let’s not forget that basically no cards were sold at MSRP back in early 2025…

The last point being what is, by all accounts, going to be the new normal. Barring outside impacts like… RAM going through the roof. Vendors will sell the cards for the ACTUAL MSRP rather than the inflated demand prices. And they will still be considerably more expensive as a result.

All of which is to say… my current card is definitely good enough but having a hard time deciding if I do one “final” upgrade for the decade. But I am an AMD boi so those are at least “reasonable” in terms of price per performance.

1. Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree. Stuff like this is partially necessity and partially a REALLY good excuse to see what the price ceiling actually is… and then turn that into the floor moving forward. Just look at gas prices
2. The “AI Bubble” is likely to be on the same level as the Dotcom Bubble and the like. It is going to be brutal and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs… and then much of the same tech will still dominate just with more realistic expectations. And that will still need large amounts of memory
3. If the “AI Bubble” really is as bad as people seem to want it to be: A LOT of the vendors who make the parts you are buying RAM to use are going to be gutted. And then RAM production will drop drastically. Which will decrease supply and…

If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.

And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.

But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.

I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.

All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?

So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?

As for whether you should crack it:

1. If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
2. If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)

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1. Poe’s law?
2. Endlessly sucking off cheney and mao in hell?

Yeah. The US definitely was horrifically evil long after other Global North countries had decided to chill but we were far from the only people running on the genocide and enslavement of the Global South.

In a lot of ways, the US was late to colonialism and took it WAY too far and commit atrocities for it. The USSR/Stalin was late to (there is probably a better term for it but I can’t remember it) peasant revolutions and took it WAY too far and commit atrocities for it… and then ended up being a global power that extended said reign of terror to anyone sharing a border with them.

Communism inherently couples both the economy and the government.

In theory, capitalism can be decoupled since it mostly depends on laissez-faire governance. Communism inherently requires a planned economy and centralized control of such.

There is theoretically nothing stopping said leaders of a communist regime from being elected through a democratic process. But much like democracies tend to favor capitalism and (lower case) libertarian ideals, communism tends to lend itself to dictatorships because… you have a centralized control of all aspects of society.

dot ml 'bout to crest the horizon like the riders of rohan.

Wooo. Was worried when the icon didn’t have “gamepad + touchpads” but the “ai generated render for legal purposes” did.

Time will tell on the ergonomics. But Valve know their shit and the Steam Deck is genuinely pleasant to use so I assume the size and angle should mean the d-pad and face buttons are still fully usable. Rather than the mess of a switch controller where only the tiniest of hands can use them without cramping.

Currently leaning “three steam controllers, maybe a steam frame when we know more” since I already have an HTPC under my TV.

I would also like a fanny pack form factor (great for spare batteries too) but it’s “just” a snapdragon. The actual chip is likely nothing compared to the displays and battery

It definitely doesn’t look glasses friendly but that is also a solved problem these days. Many of the online glasses companies directly sell them and they just push on rather than needing to buy the lenses and print a mount and then remove the old lenses and blah. My ex and I both wear glasses and we never had a problem swapping out on the facebook quest or whatever.

It is both. Standalone device but also designed to communicate with a PC via a USB dongle. So lower resource games “just work” and you take advantage of your PC (or Steam Machine…) for the heftier stuff. Which is as close to the “norm” as it gets in VR these days (although the facebooks connect over WLAN)

Yeah… be incredibly careful about shoving something with metal bristles into your charging port.

Maybe once a year I get a bit of gunk in my port (hey-oh!). Samsung (presumably all usb c androids?) are generally really good about losing their shit and yelling at you to remove the cable immediately and clean your port.

So when I get home? I just get one of my flossers (for teeth) that tend to have a cheap plastic toothpick attached to it. Works perfect, no liquids, and very minimal risk of damaging the port.

Eww.

The touchpad are amazing but do not replace an analog stick or dpad. If this is legit, it is going to be the steam controller 1 all over again where it really is only good for games without xinput gamepad support

A lot of people in graphics design et al are contractors. They get hired for a job, do it with their own resources, and then move on. Those folk tend to need to provide their own software.

Aside from that? Companies DO provide software. But, at least in my experience, early career staff decide they actually NEED matlab or some other super proprietary nonsense and take it upon themselves to get the tools they “need”. Which results in their manager having to have The Talk about why you don’t do that in an actual company and how they are REALLY lucky you are the one that saw them because that is a fireable offense.

Let’s say you are a graphics designer. You use Adobe Illustrator and you pirate it. You work for Innertrode either as a contractor or a full time employee. You make their new logo.

Adobe’s legal team are bored. They see that new logo. They know it was made with Illustrator because of some of the visual quirks/tools (or, you know, because it is anything graphical so of course it uses Adobe). They know that Innertrode doesn’t have a license. So they call up Lumberg and say “what the fuck?”.

Lumberg then calls the person who was in charge of the new logo and they point at you.

If you are staff? You were given training not to pirate anything. It is all your fault. Innertrode buys a few years of a license and apologizes and fires your ass and makes sure to tell everyone they know about you. Or you are a contractor and you signed an agreement saying you had valid licenses for everything and they just give your contact info to Adobe and move on.

And Adobe MIGHT just want to shake you down. Or they might want to make an example and sue the fuck out of some people.

Also… it is a lot of hearsay for obvious reasons, but there are very strong rumors that some of the more prominent cracks tend to add digital watermarks for the purpose of automating this.

There are two layers to this (actually a lot more but)

What you are describing is mostly supply chain. It is the idea that the package manager’s inventory should be safe. And that is already a nigh impossible task simply because so many of the packages themselves can be compromised. It seems like every other year there is a story of bad actors infiltrating a project either as an attack or as a “research paper”. But the end result is you have core libraries that may be compromised.

But the other side is what impacted OP and will still be an issue even if said supply chain is somehow 100% vetted. People are inherently going to need things that aren’t in a package manager. Sometimes that is for nefarious reasons and sometimes it is just because the project they are interested in isn’t at the point where it is using a massive build farm to deploy everywhere. Maybe it involves running blind scripts as root (don’t fucking do that… even though we all do at some point) and sometimes it involves questionable code.

And THAT is a very much unsolved problem no matter what distro. Because, historically, you would run an anti-virus scan on that. How many people even know what solutions there are for linux? And how many have even a single nice thing to say about the ones that do?

And this for a $60 perpetual license program that i should buy anyway because it’s for work

Just to pile on: NEVER pirate stuff you use for work. Audits are a thing (especially if said software company gets suspicious for whatever reason) and you WILL be thrown under the bus at a moment’s notice and put on an industry wide shitlist because you are just too much of a liability after you get caught once.

Pirate for fun and hobbyist use. The moment you are getting paid, go legit.

For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.

Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.

Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.

Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.

Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.